Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 01.djvu/52

 the newspaper stories are true, he didn't kill Sanders for having Padullo acquitted, but because of the mud he threw at his sister during the trial."

"Well, that's all in the game. The only way Sanders could get Padullo a Chinaman's chance was to make the jury lose sympathy for the girl. When they found out she was ten times as bad as the man that murdered her, they didn't feel a grudge against him."

"But was she?"

"Probably not. The Costello kid says all the evidence against her character was trumped up. He worshipped the girl, thought she was an angel. So he plugged Sanders."

"And now he'll burn for it."

"I suppose. Still, if Billy Williams can prove that Sanders' witnesses perjured themselves to ruin the girl's name, no jury in the world would convict the boy."

"But how's he going to do it? Sanders was no fool. He wasn't the kind to leave loose ends for the grievance committee of the bar association to pick up. He'd played this game a hundred times before. He once told me that a murderer had one foot out of his cell when it could be shown that he was no worse than his victim. Said that was always the first thing he tried to do."

"There's something in what you say," conceded Asman. "Take this case, now. D'you know what Sanders would do if he was defending Costello? He'd dig up a lot of witnesses that would convince a jury that he—Sanders, I mean—deserved killing. He'd show how he'd coached all his witnesses in the Padullo case to lie on the stand. There must be somebody somewhere who could tell the truth—but only Sanders knows where."

"Well," said Gowans with a chuckle, "you can't expect Sanders to get his own murderer off."

"No," Asman agreed. "That's a little too much even for Sanders. Well, let's get out of here. We've got work to do."

Asman started away. Before Gowans left he moved surreptitiously toward Sanders. Suddenly Sanders saw no more. Gowans had closed his eyes. Then both Asman and Gowans were gone.

made no effort to call after them. He understood the futility of that now. He was dead. A realist, he could no longer hope. He could only lie there and think.

The whole content of his thinking was strangely reoriented. All his life his thought had been focused exclusively on himself. Absolute, unqualified selfishness—that was his ethics. If he inadvertently committed an unselfish act, that was cause for remorse, for an aching conscience. That was weakness, inexcusable weakness. On this ethical basis he had lived all the mature years of his life.

But Jason Sanders was gone now, dead. No longer could he scheme cunningly for his personal advancement. His little ambitions struck him as trifling, utterly unimportant. He found it impossible to think of Jason Sanders save in the third person, objectively and impersonally. He was merely one of many faces that crowded his memory.

Of these faces only one stood out clearly, in bold relief. That was the sallow face of the boy, Costello. And he was inclined to think kindly of Costello, pityingly. The youth had been a fool. He had committed his crime openly in the sight of many men. He had killed to avenge a wrong, and for that he was to die.

The two physicians had reasoned well. Despite the legal talents of Billy Williams, he could not hope to untangle the maze of perjury that had successfully blasted the reputation of Maria Costello. It was true that there existed a key